ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD Young Vic

In this version Orpheus is delighted when Eurydice dies and goes to hell and he doesn’t want her ever to come back. The French critics at its premiere in 1858 thought Offenbach’s operetta vulgar, indecent, coarse and grotesque. Wagner described it as “a dunghill in which the whole of Europe wallowed.” What riled the critics was the lampooning of classical antiquity and Gluck’s opera. The operetta is a satire on Parisian high society during the Second Empire, an era famous for its horizontals, its oh-la-la debauchery and, of course, the can-can. Rory Bremner, who had a hilarious success with Bertolt Brecht’s farce, A Respectable Wedding at the Young Vic, has done the modern up-dating. Orpheus is a prissy violin celebrity, Eurydice is a dead common Estuary girl, Pluto is disguised as a personal trainer, Public Opinion wears a suit patterned out of tabloid print. Jupiter, in disguise as a fly, is dressed in full S&M bondage gear. There is no orchestra, only a piano and a violin (off-stage). Musically disappointing, Oliver Mears’s awful, heavy-handed, touring production for Scottish Opera is also relentlessly crude. As for the can-can, it’s abysmal.